The ECIL (European Conference on Information Literacy) taking place in Tallinn at the moment is the same gig that got me to Croatia this time last year, and yes, some things just stay the same, like the folk dancing we endured last night; and tea breaks remain the same wherever one is.
This is the job… You find some time to do a bit of research, write it up, hope someone reads it. You go to as many conferences as your limited travel budget will stretch to, you network a bit, you publish a book and try to promote it. You eventually get invited to some other conference where you meet a nice Catalan academic who works in Norway and you write a proposal and eventually get an invite to do the work and suddenly you’re quite big in Scandinavia (or at least, among a very select audience of Scandinavians). It’s quite hard work sometimes but it’s probably better than being, say, a traffic warden.
Being 42 